


eczema and asthma

by tragakes (lejf)



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Double sickfic, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pining, Sickfic, Some squickiness due to describing conditions and diseases, actually a two for one deal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 12:08:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20174002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lejf/pseuds/tragakes
Summary: “I heard you coughing.”No, he couldn’t have– Bucky hasn’t been in the apartment all day. Did he cough in the night? Somehow, it’s terrifying to think that he’s been exposed. Steve has seen a facet of his mortality, his vulnerability, and that is not allowed. Bucky’s supposed to be untouchable. For every weakness Steve has, Bucky’s supposed to have a strength to support him.“It’ll be gone by tomorrow. Don’t worry about me.”Steve’s grip tightens, then suddenly moves upwards and fastens around his injured wrist. It catches Bucky off-guard. He can’t disguise his flinch, let alone the bulge where it’s swollen. “Your wrist,” Steve says, brimming with accusation. How dare you, he seems to be saying.





	eczema and asthma

The rain hasn’t stopped. But it’s not just rain. It’s sleet and hail that strikes the one window with a million tiny knuckles and is pale like bone. It fills up the insides of Bucky’s head with white noise.

It’s 1935. One in five men are unemployed, and all the white noise in the world can’t stop Bucky from hearing _the sound_. It bloats the place up. It slithers through the walls, cold-bloodedly reptilian, and rattles in waking and in sleep. Rattle, rattle, wetly. 

The death rattle’s coming from Steve’s throat. 

Steve’s in the bedroom under the paltry covers. He didn’t say anything when Bucky came back home, but Bucky knows he’s there because he can still hear the rattle. He must be cold — even Bucky feels the cold. The rain has soaked into and under his skin and is starting to freeze. They say that it’s nearly zero Fahrenheit today. He saw it on the papers in the street, where someone called it bullshit because it wasn’t snowing. If it was that cold, why ain’t it snowing? Why the fucking sleet? 

Bucky doesn’t know why it isn’t snowing. All he knows is that it’s cold. He’s got a basin of water heating on the stove and he puts his fingers close enough to the flames to fear burning. He looks out at the window. The tenement across them is a vague shape, like an observer looking back. It’s all static because of the rain but he thinks he can make out the limp and grey wires of the clotheslines. The clothes themselves are inside and haven’t dried yet. Bucky had slung them over the chairs and the table because there’s nowhere else to put them so they can freeze solid instead. 

The water’s warm. He gets two rags and takes it all to the bedroom. “Stevie,” he says softly. Steve has the covers up to his neck. He looks shrunken. Usually that attitude is bursting out of him, too big for his body, but now something’s caved in. His eyes take a moment to focus on Bucky. 

“Buck,” Steve says, hoarse. “You don’t have to…” 

Bucky sits down on the edge of the bed. He wets a rag, dipping it in, watching it disturb the face of the water. Then he wipes Steve down, starting from the neck. Steve’s been sweating all day despite the cold. He’s scratched off the scabs of some of his eczema and they’re bleeding. Bucky feels like his heart’s going to stop beating, because seeing Steve like this squeezes it so tightly. He has to be careful with Stevie. He makes sure to keep the rag warm and uses the other one to dry him off before it starts cooling on his skin. 

He just wants to see Steve smiling. He wants Steve to smile at _him_. He wants Steve to call him a jerk. He wants Steve to…

“Let me.” Steve insists on wiping down where he can reach and Bucky always lets him. How could he bear to take Steve’s dignity away too? Bucky just cleans his back and they work in silence.

When they’re done, he tucks the covers under Steve’s chin and folds the edges in even though he’s going to bed soon too anyway. 

He uses the rest of the water to wash his own hands and feet. Then he takes off his jacket and his boots and goes to bed. Pressed together and even through their clothes, he can feel the thinness of Steve’s frame and the tremors that plague it, like an entire being made not of glass but frail sinew and muscle and blood. Warm but only barely. Bucky tries to cover Steve with every inch of himself that he can.

When Steve coughs, they both rock with the force of it, and Bucky sleeps listening to the sound of the snake in his lungs.

*

The next day, it’s not nearly zero. It’s below zero. Bucky is hit with it immediately upon waking — the shattering of some arbitrary line. He’s clutching Steve close to his chest in the aftermath of some nightmare he doesn’t remember. Steve doesn’t hold him in return; Steve’s itching himself instead. And he’s coughing. He has his eyes screwed shut. Bucky disentangles himself and then Steve’s coughing again. Not just coughing, but coughing uncontrollably, as though he has to force out his lungs, fight a curse that’s too obsessed to let him go. Bucky jolts awake.

Steve’s eyes fly open. They’re watering and feverish. Bucky grabs him and hauls him upright and sprints out of the room, the floor so cold that it lances up through him with every step, the air so cold that it’s like being plunged into water. The sound of Steve’s coughing follows him through his mad scramble. It’s the type of cough that seizes the body and is so uncontrollable that there’s no chance to even breathe in. Steve’s suffocating and hacking and when Bucky rushes back in. His face is red and he’s clutching his chest.

He vomits into the basin like he’s being beaten across the back with a bludgeon. His narrow shoulders quake and he heaves forwards with each gag. Bucky rubs his back. He pushes Steve’s hair away from his sweat-matted forehead. He wishes so fiercely that he could rip this disease out from Stevie but he can’t, he can only stand there and watch as it wracks Steve’s body again and again. Steve’s eyes are dazed, he’s sweating, he’s shaking, he grabs onto Bucky’s hip to steady himself — there’s nothing even coming out anymore. It’s just Steve’s body spasming and Bucky wants to scream at it to _stop_, don’t you see that he’s got nothing left?! Stop it, _stop it_!

“Sorry,” Steve says. He grabs Bucky’s hand when Bucky goes to brush a strand of his hair back again. “‘M sorry. I just–“

“Don’t be sorry. God, Stevie–“ 

Clutches Steve and squeezes his eyes shut as though he could will this all away, but Steve’s real and clammy beneath his fingers. There are tears running down Steve’s face, not from sadness or pain but from pure reflex after being put under such strain. How awful it is, Bucky thinks, to lose your autonomy — to have your body betray you. Steve’s body betrays him at every turn. 

“Go to work.” Steve pats the side of his leg and slumps back into bed. He looks fallen, graceless, and Bucky quivers for a moment from the pure awfulness of it all. This shouldn’t happen. This shouldn’t happen to anyone, least of all Steve. 

He doesn’t do what he’s told. He has to wash the basin. He has to make breakfast for Steve. It’s just soup with potatoes in it, but it warms him like he’s the one drinking when he watches the bump of Steve’s throat bob. 

Then he’s out of the apartment, running through the snow, surrounded by ever-growing puddles that are frozen solid. Ice watches him from every uneven surface with white eyes. He’s so preoccupied looking at the pale boniness of everything that he slips on the old dock wood and twists his wrist catching himself. 

Even if it weren’t for the fall, he’d still be late to work. His supervisor overlooks it this time, but is clearly disappointed, and the fear of failing someone resonates through Bucky enough that he tries to make up for it. But inevitably he’s been putting strain on his wrist and by the time his shift’s over, it’s swollen. It’s clear that he’s out of function. He’s disallowed from staying for overtime. 

He heads back in the snow that’s melting all over his clothes. The chill is whole-body. It starts from the tips of his fingers shoved deep into his coat and his nose and his ears. After a while, they go past cold into painful and spread further into the centre. His hands ache. His wrist throbs. His cheeks sting. 

He arrives home and it’s barely warmer than outside. Bucky shakes off the snow and listens to Steve’s death-rattle. It’s the slow, rhythmic one that means he’s asleep. Bucky should get some more medicine for Steve. They have enough money to. Even if they didn’t, even if this bout lasts longer, he could— he could sell the chair. He could sell his other pair of boots. He could sell the fucking _table_. Anything that’s not necessary to Steve staying alive. Sell it all. They can move into a single-room apartment. Bucky can even beg. He can steal. He can join a gang. He can- he can- he _will_ do anything- _anything_ to ensure he can get Steve what he needs. 

He thinks about sending a letter to his mother, begging her for money even when she’s also struggling, and it twists every organ inside him. 

But if he couldn’t, he would be worse than a failure. Stevie put his life into Bucky’s hands. No— Bucky _pledged himself_ to Steve. To fail being with him ’til the end of line is murder. It is murder without a cause, murder through incompetence.

Bucky sits, every part of him stiff, and even the warmth slowly returning is painful. The sun sets soon, burdened by the same gravity that weighs him down. The days are too short. He needs to leave before it gets any colder. 

Before he does, he stops by the bedroom and listens to Steve’s rattle. The death rattle earned its name aptly. It should be heard only when someone’s about to die, their muscles are weak to clear any of the secretions anymore. They can’t even swallow. They’re nothing at that point. But Steve _can_ swallow. He’s just got mucous in his throat so often that every breath is filled with it, vibrating and filling the apartment with this noise.

Bucky hates the sound, but there is a deeper, more dreadful fear tied to it. What if one day he comes home to rooms filled with dead air — and it’s silent? 

What if the rattle stops?

*

Bucky knows nothing about diseases, especially not experiencing them. He’d grown up incredibly healthy. A cold was a two-day affair. He’d never had an infection. He’d never had an asthma attack. 

Which is why it’s a surprise for him to wake up the next morning, coughing. Bucky snaps alert after he realises it’s coming from _him_, stares at Steve — Steve’s still got his eyes closed, thank God — and slips out of the bed. The layers of jackets and coats go on first. Then the boots. He can feel another cough rising in his throat. He hurries into the kitchen and clasps both of his hands over his mouth but it’s untameable. It bursts out of him. He hunches over to try to keep it controlled, or at least muffle it, trying not to let Steve hear. His body trembles. 

He drinks some water but it simply douses his insides with the same freezing cold that envelopes everything else. He re-heats stew for Steve, and then he’s off to work. His wrist is still bulbous, and now he’s also coughing. He puts in his best efforts although he feels his supervisor watching him. 

Then he goes to the drug store, where its insides are lit by surreal white lights and is tiled with clean white floors. He asks them what they have for pneumonia. The clerk says, after a while, after hearing him cough, that he doesn’t have pneumonia. 

“It’s not for me,” Bucky says. 

“Little sister? Mother? Girlfriend?” He’s not asked if it’s for a kid. Bucky’s eighteen. He doesn’t look old enough to have children yet. 

“A– friend.” 

“Friend?” the clerk says, “You know that there’s nothing for pneumonia, right? They’re developing antibiotics for it now, but that’s not on the market yet. Your friend just has to tough it out. Keep her warm, fed, and clean.”

“Eczema, then.”

The clerk looks at him. “Nothing for eczema either. Go see a specialist. There’s a dermatologist I can recommend you in New York City.”

“I don’t have the money to see a specialist.” Bucky’s jaw is set tight. 

“Fine,” the clerk snaps. “This works for people sometimes. Soothes itches. But trust me, the best thing to do is just to keep her away from any known allergens and for God’s sake, don’t let them scratch.”

Then why does it feel like he’s allergic to everything, Bucky wants to scream, and Steve’s not a _her_. Why does Steve have to be a _her_ for Bucky to be buying medicine for him? 

*

When Bucky gets home, the sun has set. It’s started sleeting again. The rain’s soaked into his skin. It’s dripping off his eyelashes. Through the windows, it casts moving shadows through the apartment and across Steve, who’s sitting at the table. 

“Steve!” Bucky stumbles forwards. “What’re you doing up?” 

“I’m not gonna die in _bed_.”

“You’re not gonna die, Stevie.” Bucky slots his arms under Steve’s, tries to lift him to urge him back to the bedroom. 

“No.” Steve pushes him away. Bucky stops immediately. Instead, he touches Steve’s hands; they’re hot, feverish. “I won’t just _lie_ there.” 

“C’mon, Stevie. For me. Just until you get better.”

Steve squints at him. For a moment Bucky thinks he’s going to give in, but then Steve’s gaze hardens.

“I heard you coughing.”

No, he couldn’t have– Bucky hasn’t been in the apartment all day. Did he cough in the night? Somehow, it’s terrifying to think that he’s been exposed. Steve has seen a facet of his mortality, his vulnerability, and that is not allowed. Bucky’s supposed to be untouchable. For every weakness Steve has, Bucky’s supposed to have a strength to support him. 

“It’ll be gone by tomorrow. Don’t worry about me.”

Steve’s grip tightens, then suddenly moves upwards and fastens around his injured wrist. It catches Bucky off-guard. He can’t disguise his flinch, let alone the bulge where it’s swollen. “Your wrist,” Steve says, brimming with accusation. How dare you, he seems to be saying. 

“It doesn’t really hurt.” Bucky laughs. He teases it out of Steve’s grip and shakes it about to prove that it works. 

“_Bucky_.” 

His smile falters at Steve’s tone. 

“You can’t— go out to work while I’m just– lying here like-“

“What am I supposed to do? _Not_ work? We need an income, Steve!”

“–like I’m already _dead_!” Steve’s expression is screwed up, he’s breathing hard as though they’ve been yelling but it’s because he’s just short of breath. “I _need_ to get up. I can’t just lie around when you’re getting hurt.”

“Y’know how cold it is out there?”

“Good,” Steve bites out. “Maybe it’ll be enough to make me feel alive.” He stands up, lurches dangerously like a broken spar in strong winds, and Bucky’s hands shoot out to catch him. He’s met with a scathing look. Bucky juts out his own chin and thinks _damnit if you’re going to be stubborn, then so am I_. 

“You’re not going outside. It’s below zero.”

“You gonna stop me, Buck? You gonna stop me like everyone else does?” 

“_Yes_.” Bucky plants himself in front of the door. “I _am_. Because it’s freezing outside and you’ve got pneumonia. There’s ice everywhere and I screwed up my wrist because I wasn’t careful and at least I’m going to make sure that isn’t going to happen to _you_.”

“Why not? Because you’re big and strong Bucky while I’m weak and _stupid_ Steve?!”

“Because—” he wants to shout it out so badly. Because I’m _not_ big and strong. My weakest and stupidest part is how I care for _you_! I’m _selfish_, and I want you to be safe, I need you to be safe so damn desperately that it aches, “—you have fucking pneumonia and asthma and rheumatic fever and what’s the damn cold gonna do for that?”

Steve tries to move him out of the way, but he’s feverish and swaying where he stands. Bucky stands there resolutely even as his heart crumples. Steve’s a fierce idiot, trying to shove at him and thumping at his chest, but he’s too weak to leave anything through Bucky’s layers. He tires himself out, panting and clutching at Bucky’s jacket as though he’s gonna shove Bucky up against the door. 

“You think this is easy for me either?” Bucky says quietly, looking at Steve’s downturned blond-crowned head.

“God, you’re such an asshole.”

Bucky wraps his arms impossibly gently around Steve’s body. The preciousness of Steve strikes him as it always does, and he left reeling like a bell ringing after the rains. 

“I’m pretty sure you caught your cough from me,” Steve says. 

“Don’t be stupid.”

Steve doesn’t bother responding because they both know it’s true and he must be tired of arguing as well. He turns his head away instead, resting his ear against Bucky’s chest and releasing Bucky’s jacket to itch at himself instead. 

“I got you something for the eczema,” Bucky says. 

“Why? It’s not gonna kill me. You could’ve used that money to feed yourself properly.”

“You said it was so bad you couldn’t sleep last week.” Sometimes the urge is just that persistent. It keeps Bucky awake, too, like itch is the third person in their bed, hovering above them. “Is that why you’re awake now?”

“I’m awake because I’ve been sleeping all day.”

Steve draws back. His mouth is still set into a firm line, the seam of his lips so forbidden, thin and pale. Steve’s mouth is no one’s ideal of a mouth. It’s rude, it swears, it talks back, it gets into trouble, it coughs, it frowns, yet it’s so irresistible to Bucky for some unnameable and insidious reason. 

“Here.” Bucky takes it from his pocket and offers Steve the tube of it like a peace offering. Steve’s expression is mixed, a chimera of gratitude and guilt. “I’ll help you put it on.”

“I don’t want to go back to bed.”

Bucky detests this push-and-pull, this emotional strain that comes with the physical. “Just for the moment. You can get up again after.” 

He gets Steve on the bed and takes off the jacket that Steve had put on. He helps Steve unbutton his shirt. Steve’s skin is– it’s his _skin_, faintly warm, taut, rising and falling with each breath, trepidatiously alive. The eczema clusters around the joints and sometimes in places for seemingly no reason at all. Bucky unscrews the cap and takes a dollop onto his finger. 

Where others shy away from the peeling scabbed skin, Bucky ventures with little hesitation. He rubs it into Steve’s raised and sore-looking rash around his elbows. He massages it into Steve’s hip. Bucky hates that he thinks this, but sometimes he thinks of the women he’s lain with and what he does to them, what he rubs into _their_ bared bellies and backs, marking them and watching their skin tremble. 

But this is nothing like that. Entertaining such thoughts is perverse when he’s trying to help Steve. They flee his mind when his fingers pass over rough scabs that scatter Steve’s spine, or when Steve starts itching at one of his hands and Bucky slaps it away. “No scratching,” he reminds, and Steve squirms in frustration. It’s too much to see Steve like that, so Bucky ends up taking Steve’s hand and rubbing at it to soothe the burn under the skin. No scratching, but rubbing can be okay. This way he doesn’t break skin. It irritates the wounds less and they won’t fester. He can feel the relief through Steve, whole-bodied tension melting away.

As he moves further down, Bucky puts Steve’s legs into his lap and rolls up his pants to apply the cream. The divot where bone ends and muscle begins is clear, and it’s all grown over with spots of eczema, old and new. Even weeks after it’s healed, it leaves an angry dark red mark that slowly fades into ruddy brown and then nothing. Steve’s marked everywhere with it. Bucky massages ointment in where it’s still pink and there’s still white, dead skin. He works down Steve’s thighs, pays particular attention to the back of his knees, down his shin, a streak across his ankle, his toes. 

When Bucky’s done, Steve is actually asleep, warm and content. Bucky pulls the covers back over Steve’s legs and stands up. Steve’s lying on his back, face slack in sleep, oddly ethereal and untouchable, wheezing and rattling with each breath. The rain outside deepens to a roar. Sometimes Bucky himself wants to know why, of all people, _Steve_. 

Many people tell Bucky that he has everything. He has a mother, he has younger siblings, he has a job, he has friends, he has good looks, he has a strong body, a smooth voice, and women at every turn. They look on at Steve as some sort of charity case for Bucky’s ego. But Steve is Bucky’s _childhood friend_. There is nothing as singularly irreplaceable as that. Steve entrenched himself in everything that Bucky treasured, and soon it turned around. Everything that Bucky treasures is somehow rooted in Steve. 

Steve has _nothing_ other than Bucky, and that fact is important enough to devastate to him. If Bucky forgot about Steve, if Bucky abandoned Steve, there’d be no mother, no father, no sister, no brother, no other person on the whole Earth who understands the importance of Steve. Who would bother trying to make him laugh? Who would stop and look? Because _Bucky_ does. Bucky stops and looks every time — and that’s why Steve is his demise. Bucky would incinerate everything for Steve for no reason other than that it’s Steve. He would give everything right now to be able to unroot himself from this spot and have Steve sit up, unfettered and whole, and let Bucky _touch him_ in a way that’s not medical and need-based but intimate.

Bucky could do it right now. He could brush his lips so lightly that Steve would never know.

He doesn’t. The urge is there, and the longer he stays there and thinks about Steve, the more it builds in him, pressure in his heart, demanding he listens and gives in to temptation, as insistent as the cough rising and itching in his throat. 

He leaves hurriedly and sits in the stairwell of their tenement until it’s dark and cold and he can’t even feel his own fingers. Don’t even think about it. Imagine Steve’s horror. Steve would leave and vanish like a droplet in the ocean. 

Instead, he forces himself to think about how hard it is for Steve. Thinks about what it’s like to have a skin condition. Bucky’s been told that eczema is fairly common, but usually in younger children because other people grow out of it, but not Steve. 

Living with it is already trouble enough. Bucky has to wash blood from the blisters out from the bedsheets and Steve’s clothes every week. If he didn’t know better, he would bandage it all up, but stifling Steve’s skin of air just makes it worse. At least it’s not on his face anymore. Why does it have to cluster around the parts that _move_? Bucky knows that bending his leg too far when it’s healing can break the scabs and start its entire cycle again. 

First it’ll start itching. Then, after rubbing or scratching, it bubbles up. It gets dry. It starts to bleed. Then they have to wait for it to scab over — can’t scratch during that time or it’ll rip off — and once the scab falls off on its own, it leaves a faint imprint that’s no longer irritating but is an obvious brand. 

Bucky had asked before what it was like. Was it like having an intruder in your own skin? Your own personal demon? 

No, Steve had said. It was just like every other disease and condition he had. It wasn’t a tagalong. It was a part of him, irrevocably and detestablytangled up in who he was. Because of it, he had to watch what he ate — seafood and dairy made it worse, and maybe that’s why Steve never grew any taller. Because of it, he looked even more sickly when it used to clump at the corner of his lips and crack when he tried to open his mouth too wide. Steve’s never been with a girl, but he says that he wonders what they’d say when they see his rashes further down his body. They’d be disgusted. They’d think it’s contagious. Most people don’t even know what eczema’s really like. It’s just blistering, bleeding, patches of red plague to them. 

It’s a disease, Steve’d concluded. A disgusting disease that brings trouble into his life. It itches under his skin all the time and the best thing he can do is ignore it. There’s no cure for it, but it won’t kill him, so it’s one of his lesser worries compared to the asthma and the heart disease.

Bucky’s yanked out of his thoughts when he nearly trips over someone who’s coming up the stairs. 

“Fuck!” they hiss. Bucky stands immediately, apologising. 

“Ah, sorry— I didn’t think there’d be anyone here at this time.”

“Can never be too careful.” Clarity sets in. It’s Bucky’s landlord. He’s rubbing at his elbow where it banged the wall. “I started patrolling around at night ‘cause I caught something fucked here the other day.”

“What’d you see?” Bucky’s mind goes to the worst things. Assault? Is it dangerous in the tenement? How’s he gonna protect Steve–

“_Homos_,” his landlord spits. “Can’t believe they were on _my_ property, committing _unthinkable_ things.” 

Bucky’s chest constricts as though he’s the one with a sickly heart, constricted so tightly that it might just collapse in on itself. He feels like a hollow tree; rot’s eaten away everything inside. 

His landlord must take his silence for appalled shock. “Don’t worry. They’re out of here now. Kicked them out as soon as I saw it. Good riddance. _Homos_, flouncing around where anyone can see and spreading their fucking disease. Disease! That’s what it is, I tell you. They do that here and they bring Satan to my doors.”

“Oh,” Bucky says. He averts his eyes as though the expression on the man’s face can physically burn him. “I should get going. It’s late.” 

The landlord ascends with him and Bucky coughs as they approach his floor and tries to think about something else, not demons under the skin or homos in the stairwell or the itch that follows Steve. But it all gets churned together like the rain and the ice into fucking sleet that sprains Bucky’s wrist and gives him a cough. 

“You sick?” the man says, after Bucky coughs again.

“No,” replies Bucky.

Steve has eczema. What Bucky has—

—is just as incurable, just as much as of a disease, non-contagious, disgusting, do not scratch—

He has nothing. Forget it.

**Author's Note:**

> I always figured Steve would have both asthma _and_ eczema.


End file.
